Lochiel, AZ

Today I did a somewhat unplanned drive to the border community of Lochiel, AZ. Weather was once again cooler than normal, with less breeze, and in the 70s. A perfect day for walking!

I actually started out wanting to take the dogs along a creekbed near the border 20 miles east of Lochiel, but the creekbed was dry and there was an unusual large amount of USBP vans up and down Forest Road 61 that I felt I was in the way. I felt uneasy in these oak-stuffed woods and went on.

Another creekbed further west had some water in it and I stopped here a bit to walk south, following an illegal trail. The dogs were up front and when they stopped and froze, I turned around, but not before coming across a very dead cow that didn't seem dead for long. The poor thing looks like it slipped and fell and broke its leg while trying to get to the shallow creek.

We weren't on the trail for long and I resumed the drive west to Lochiel. This is normally a popular area for ATVers as the dirt roads plow over hilltops and into dry north-south traveling drainage ditches, throwing a dust trail behind the driver that rises for miles.

It had been a while since I was in this ranching community. All the roads leading to the border, including forest roads, were now marked private property or off limits, perhaps because of the increased drug smuggling activity here. Even the old village of Lochiel is now closed off and I couldn't walk around the historic buildings to take photos. The last time I was here I did walk around the church, the old post office, the cemetery and gazed into the pretty valley into Sonora. This area has so much history to it, and there's an air of mystique around the border, and the rolling hills are inviting enough for a stroll. All that is now closed off to the curious explorer like me. A bulletin board for the Lochiel community with nothing on it is all that reminds the traveler that one has arrived in the old village.

But oddly enough, for a well-known drug smuggling area, the border fence here is an easily-surmountable six-foot-high single metal fence reinforced with hedgehogs. This is deceiving to the smugglers as there are other surveillance devices in the area that track movement, but for the casual observer the fence here looks flimsy and hardly an obstacle.

It's also a deceivingly peaceful land. I heard or saw no one other than animals: staring cows, barking dogs and curious horses and ponies stood along the road. It's rolling grassland hills studded with oaks and cottonwoods, junipers and smaller manzanitas, with taller tree-studded peaks in Sonora. Ravens post sentry in tall cottonwoods across the landscape and fly off when you get too close. It doesn't look like violent drug smugglers would want to come here, but come they do when the sun goes down.

It is through this area that a group of drug smugglers came through earlier in the year and killed a border patrol agent as they wandered northbound.

Today the only place I stopped was the de Niza monument north of the village, the only thing that seems to call for visitors to stop and rest. Fray Marcos de Niza was the first European to step foot here in 1539, and the concrete cross and monument off the road commemorates this. This is a nice area for a wayward traveler to stop and take in the landscape, but there is no shade, no water, no stores nearby where people may go and ask for directions. One is on one's own here between Nogales and Sierra Vista, and someone who breaks down here may wait for hours for any help as there is no cell phone reception and AM radio is intermittent out of Tucson.

A border crossing point was open here until the 1980s but then shut down. The old guard shack still remains on the Mexican side. Now all that remains are sun-burned adobe homes with junky yards and blackened wood fences, skinny cows and mangy horses. The cows have open range here, and they sometimes stand in the middle of the road like one did for me as I entered the area.

I didn't see one USBP van though. Instead, I saw fire trucks moving toward the 1000-acre wildfire that had started two days ago between Lochiel and the ghosttown of Duquesne further north. The firefighters had it contained by the time I got there today, but hotspots were still smoldering from a distance. They saved a hilltop ranch home and surely fought hard in yesterday's wind to get this manmade fire out. The tall oak trees look burned but still alive.

I turned around at ghosttown of Duquesne due to the time. This is where ATVers would park and mark the dusty forest roads with their tracks. Today, due to the simmering embers, only fire trucks were parked here.

It was already past 4pm now and I had driven 43 miles, and did very little walking with the dogs. I didn't want to go any further and drove back the way I came. The dogs resumed their barking at cows and skinny horses along the way as fine desert dust waffed into the open truck windows.

The road to Lochiel is a double-wide dirt road that seemed much smoother in Santa Cruz county than in Cochise County. Once back in Cochise County, though, the USBP vans increased again. Something had to be going on today that I wasn't aware of. I saw no other vehicles or people the entire time. This is where armed agents position themselves on rocky overlooks with their sights on the border. It's best to leave them alone.

Today's little roadtrip didn't yield much in hiking as I had hoped as what I wanted to walk along was closed off to me. I doubt we even went two miles when we did get out of the truck. I wanted to see for myself the change in this area, the seemingly depressing view of both buildings and landscapes. Where had all the people gone? I felt as if I was driving in abandoned Nomansland, and despite the beauty of this place, was glad to be back home in the early evening.

We were back home shortly after 6pm and once again Kevin was already in bed listening to his radio; that's what happens when one gets up at 3am most days. The Mississippi River continues to rise and the floodwaters have now reached the Vicksburg, MS area. Entire river communities are under threat of being washed away; peole's entire livelihoods at a loss.

Spain had had two earthquakes in the southeastern part of the country, registering 4.5 and 5.1. I could hear NPR updates via my AM radio intermittently while driving along the border. Ten people were announced dead by the time I logged online and massive damage was reported. This is so odd as despite me reading the usgs.gov site most days, hadn't seen any tremblors for Spain that registered above 2.5. A long-deceased seismologist who died in 1915, Bendandi, had predicted a big quake for Rome today, which resulted in one out of five Romans taking the day off today. My question of course is, had Bendandi predicted the big Italian quake of 2009 in which around 300 were killed? He was either off by two years or off by a few hundred miles!